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Open Mike: Why Creationism May Be Ungodly

As an unregenerate, dyed-in-the-wool Doubter I have fairly radical views about religion. Not according to me, of course, but probably the religious would see it that way. But one thing that's always perplexed me is what I understand to be a central tenet of fundamentalism: that everything in the Bible must be literally true.

I've learned to my surprise over the years that many people who have argued religion with me haven't actually read the Bible, which I find curious. One friend told me that she knows what's in it because she hears about it from her priest, and that's enough for her.

Well and good, but still, I'd recommend reading the Bible as well as at least a few lay commentaries on it. I'll set aside atheistic favorites like Doubt: A History by the talented Jennifer Michael Hecht (she's also a poet) or the delightfully entertaining Ecce Homo! by the French materialist Baron d'Holbach. And I'm actually not a big fan of "The New Atheism"—Hitchens, Dawkins et alia—which as a rule I find tendentious and ponderous as well as partially if not largely irrelevant. For believers, I don't think logic enters into it, so logical refutations are sort of talking past the point.

If you appreciate blasphemy rendered with a sharp stick and lemon juice, though, you'd enjoy the d'Holbach, the world's first modern biography of Jesus of Nazareth. Pity it can hardly be found. The edition I have is the 1977 Gordon Press reproduction of the first American translation of 1827; the book originally appeared pseudonymously in 1770—in Amsterdam, I believe—as Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ. Its author put himself in considerable peril by writing it. Its English translator, one George Houston, c. 1799, whose words were the basis for the "rev. and corr." American First, was tossed in jail for two years and fined just for translating it. [UPDATE: It's actually on the web, in its entirety. The web version is apparently the British translation, with footnotes that the first American edition lacks. Amazing! Thanks to Matteo for this. —MJ]

But I digress. As I was saying, I'd recommend reading, preferably simultaneously, at least two translations of at least the New Testament (although the Old is astounding and hence, really not to be missed). For those who prefer to read English, I'd recommend a reader's edition of the famous King James Bible, rendered at the end of the Elizabethan era and a masterpiece of translation in its own right (I have a thing for Elizabethan translations, including the KJV). Augment that with something such as J. B. Phillips' New Testament in Modern English. Not only are they Englished quite differently, but the translators in either case had quite different sources from which to work. Then there are commentaries for both the credulous and the skeptical which further illumine the experience. (The one I wanted to recommend I can't find...I wonder if I loaned it to someone.)

In any event it seems basic to me for both believers and non-believers to discover first what we are talking about.

If one actually reads the Bible, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the literary methods employed are things such as allegory and extended metaphor, tales with morals, mythos, parables, symbolism, and poetic justice. In other words, you can't read it "literally"—or you miss many of the points entirely!

"No, no, you must take Aesop literally. This one's not about human beings preparing for the future, it's only about one actual ant, and one actual grasshoppper, who plays the fiddle. No, 'fiddle' is not a euphemism for the way grasshoppers make noise by rubbing their legs together! This grasshopper played an actual fiddle, made of wood with catgut strings and a horsehair bow. The point of the story? Just that an ant is more likely to make it through a winter than a grasshopper is. Why would you even ask? It has no meaning beyond that, and there is no lesson or moral or significance in the story for people; am I an ant? No. Are you a grasshopper?! No. Don't be stupid...."

Some Sunday thoughts
But here's the point about Creationism. If you believe in God, and God (who created us) gave us our brains, and the brains God gave us are capable of understanding the mechanism of how He made the world and everything in it, how could anyone plausibly refuse such a gift? Evolution is simply God in action; our ability to understand it also has to be a privilege granted by God, does it not? Why did God both create DNA and also let us detect and decode it, if He didn't want us to understand the mechanisms of His creation? Since you really can't understand much of anything about the world without understanding evolution, averting one's eyes—deliberately choosing to remain in ignorance—is to refuse one of God's greatest gifts...if all gifts come from God.

I've simply never seen the religion and evolution as being incompatible, is all. Unless you insist on reading the Good Book's creation allegory literally, which seems on its face like a fool's errand to this infidel. But then, I'm just imaging or postulating the position of the believer, not being one myself. Maybe I don't get it. It simply seems to me that if I were a religious person in the time of Darwin, my reaction would merely have been, "Ahh! So that's how He did it."

I'm just sayin'.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic essays by Yr. Hmbl. Blogger that appear only, but not always, on Sundays.

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These Are the Voyages... (Very OT)

Stewart Brand and Dr. Mae Jemison chaired two of the paper tracks

By Ctein

Last weekend I attended the 100 Year Starship Study (100 YSS) public conference. Its three-day mission? To figure out what it will take for humanity to launch a starship 100 years from now.

Initiated* by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 100 YSS was created by David Neyland, director of the Tactical Technology Office of DARPA, along with Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames Research Center. Having created said baby, it's now being put out for adoption. That's the DARPA way.

Now NASA's interest we can understand, but why DARPA?

Space has always been important to DARPA. In fact Eisenhower started DARPA (back then just ARPA) in direct response to Sputnik.

Is a starship germane to present-day DARPA? Not likely, but the approaches and solutions to the problems of biosystems, energy, food, long-duration missions, building durable organizations that can stay focused for more than an election, and so on...those are all problems that interest DARPA.

DARPA's also interested in the fringe benefits. The year 1969 hosted the first human mission to the moon and the first message sent over a blue-sky, military-driven kludge of a computer called ARPAnet.

Yup, these are the folks who invented the Internet. (And, no, Al Gore never claimed he invented it—that is a politico-urban myth. But it has made for a lot of good jokes.)

OK, that's the background. 100 YSS had 1300 registrants, over half of whom showed up (there were two other major space science conferences happening in the same time frame. There need to be more weekends in a year.)

A small circle of SF friends included Gerry Nordley and Joe Haldeman

Interestingly, I knew almost none of them. OK, I knew a fair number of the speakers, especially the nuts and bolts guys (and they were almost all guys). And, of course, pretty much all the SF authors. But, among the attendees, I saw hardly any faces I recognized. Not that I know everyone in the SF community, but I know a fair cross-section, especially among the core groups.

That is to say, this was not your usual sci-fi crowd.

Open Mike: Wacky Waukesha

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts to remind readers—as well as himself—that Yr. Hmbl. Author occasionally thinks about things having little to do with photography. These posts appear on TOP on Sundays.

Past topics have included a "Jazz Starter Kit," "The All-Time Best Looking Roadsters," an appreciation of dentists—and a brief article about albatross bars.

Kicking off tomorrow, when we get back to photography, just for fun: a countdown of "The Most Desirable Cameras on the Planet."

-

The medium-sized Wisconsin town I live in, Waukesha (pronounced WOK-uh-shaw—by most of us, anyway), is famous for getting people lost.

If you look at the map of Wisconsin, pretty much everyplace looks more or less normal—until you come to the peculiar little tangle that is Waukesha.

It probably doesn't look so bad from above, but add the complication of steep hills scattered about, one-way streets, factories (and a quarry) that take up many blocks and serve as impediments to navigation, the river that meanders diagonally through town, streets that change names when they go straight and keep the same name even though they turn, and such innovations as two-way streets that abruptly turn in to one-way streets, and it becomes obvious that Waukesha did not attract the traffic planners who graduated at the top of their class.

I know there are probably European cities that are worse, but those were laid out along goat paths and sized for medieval carts. The first white settler in Waukesha only arrived 177 years ago. That was before the automobile, but that's our sole excuse.

The old joke here is that the only reason people live in Waukesha at all is that they drove in and couldn't find their way back out.

It might not be entirely a joke. See the little five-way intersection in the middle of this satellite picture? (That's a street coming in from due south, even though you can't see it because of the trees.) There used to be a gazebo in the middle of it, until they moved it across the river (you can see the relocated gazebo in this screenshot at the very upper left). Rumor has it that when they were moving the gazebo and re-routing the traffic patterns, there was a period of three days or so when all five streets were one-way inbound. That is, there were five legal ways to get to the intersection and no legal way to get out.

That might be apocryphal, but I choose to believe it. There is such a thing as patterns. This story fits in. Even if it's not true, it could be.

It's now a five-way stop, which is a little dicey because there are stop signs from which, when you are stopped, you cannot see every other stop sign—where other people might or might not be stopped. People sort of guess who goes next. You shouldn't live on that corner if you don't like the sound of honking. And I don't refer to our biannual visitors, the Canada geese.

This one's right near me—I go through it almost every day. It was designed to help promote civil strife and divisiveness; you see, 50% of the population believes this is two intersections, and the other 50% are of the opinion it's one. This means that no matter what you do, half of your fellow citizens think you're being either ignorant or a jerk.

It's actually one intersection, at least according to the big "DO NOT BLOCK INTERSECTION" signs next to the white-striped no-man's area. Unfortunately, I'm the only person who lives in town who has noticed those. Some of my neighbors think I am running a red light when I obey the signs and decline to stop and linger in the white stripey area.

A few years ago, they rebuilt this entire intersection—carefully preserving all of its layout deficiencies.

And whose bright idea was this? Track this with me now...you're proceeding westbound on the street at the bottom of the screen grab. You opt not to turn right at the intersection at the lower left, but instead keep proceeding straight...and end up going in exactly the same direction as if you'd turned right.

Traffic planners solved this dilemma by making the spur that doubles back (on the left) one-way southwest. As you come around that bend, though, you'd better watch out for the people who still don't get that it's one-way even after having lived here for thirty years. (Or maybe they don't get it because they have lived here for thirty years, and remember when it was two-way.) They'll be coming right at you. It's happened to me.

I'm actually kind of shocked at how clean and sensible this next Waukesha intersection looks from the air. At ground level, from behind the wheel of a vehicle, say, things are not nearly so tidy. I'd say this is where new drivers go to die, except that wouldn't be funny. This intersection—or perhaps we should call it an "intersection-type area"—achieves quite an impressive degree of confusingness.

First of all, that's a road heading due north from the striped area, not a parking lot. This is another of our town's five-way intersections.

Coming from the west (left), there are two left-hand turn lanes, except that in this case you're expected to know that bearing left is considered to be "turning" left—you're not supposed to make a hard left-hand turn on to the aformentioned street that goes due north...that's illegal. If you're coming from the east-northeast (the right), bearing left is considered a left turn, and there's an arrow...except there's no space for more than about two cars to sit there and wait for it (there are two cars sitting there in the picture. The next one will be partially blocking the left lane; the next one after that is supposed to stop behind the striped area). If you're coming from the southwest, bearing right is considered to be going straight, and there is a place to wait for the left-hand turn arrow...except that to turn left you have to thread your way through a particular two of the three concrete islands, and you never know if the traffic from your right is oncoming or not, because they're supposed to stop behind the white striped area when there's a red light, and that's another thing people seem to be permanently confused about.

Add to all this the fact that everyone has to wait for the light that allows people from the little road on the lower right to enter the intersection, even though that's a sleepy little residential street and no one is ever coming from there. The light there is so long that I suspect residents avoid coming and leaving via that route. The rest of us do a lot of sitting and waiting at this intersection. And finally, there's a gas station on the corner...that's so that no one ever knows what other peoples' turn signals mean. Are they bearing left or right, or turning into the gas station? No way to know.

Finally—you can see it clearly in the picture—at the left is a railroad crossing that frequently backs people up right into the intersection and beyond (in fact, it sometimes backs people up all the way into the next intersection to the west, and that one's three times as far away). All in all, the fact that more accidents don't happen here is a testament to the resourcefulness as well as the ingrained timidity of the Waukesha driver, who, after all, learned to drive while never quite knowing where she was going or how she was going to get there.

The above litany does not exhaust the confusions of this particular delightful little corner, but the writer is aware that the descriptions are getting tiresome, and that you are growing restless. Suffice it to say that wherever traffic planners go to get educated, this should be a final exam question. "Improve this intersection, without using explosives. 1 hour."

I'll stop, although I could go on. Before I do, though, have a quick omniscient peek from dear God's perspective at this little stretch of pure Waukesha. You do have to look at it quite closely to understand it. But imagine that you're driving from the southeast, proceeding northwest, along the diagonal road that goes from the bottom right to the top left of the picture—and for some reason you want to keep driving along it. If you look carefully, you'll note that before you have gone very far, you will have to bear left and then turn right. Not once, but...twice. Just to keep going straight in the same direction on the road you're on. It's even more confusing from the opposite direction.

You're evidently just not supposed to want to stay on that road, that's all. And sure enough, you won't, unless you are blessed with a robust sense of direction and possess that admirable personal quality, persistence.

Permalost
I was a photographer in Washington D.C. for seven years, and I knew my way around that city better than I knew my own backyard. I practically knew the names of the motorcycle cops who took down the barriers when the inbound roads changed to outbound. I could get from Georgetown to National Airport faster than most cabbies. I could get around traffic jams at rush hour taking alleys block after block.

But I've lived in Waukesha for ten years and I still hardly know my way around.

I'd say come visit some time, but it's no use. You'd just get lost.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tom Burke: "Have a look at this one from a town in southern England."

Featured Comment by Lars Clausen: "One word: Roundabout. One of the new ones with sensible precedence rules. Not the Magic Roundabout."

Mike replies: Oh my lord. The Magic Roundabout in Swindon...officially wins. That looks for all the world like it was designed specifically to be bad. I can only shake my head and marvel.

Featured Comment by DC Wells: "I'm not a traffic engineer, but I think they should have left the gazebo where it was as the center of a roundabout. We often think of roundabouts as un-American—everyone goes in the same direction, no one is required to make a turning choice right away, and they are all over France—but they work, with a little practice. Even Georgia and South Carolina, always vigilant against things un-American, are adding roundabouts these days."

Mike replies: Washington D.C. has many "circles," a.k.a. roundabouts, and I liked them a lot. The one right near where we lived, at Mass Ave and Western Avenue on the Maryland-D.C. border, worked very well.

Featured Comment by erlik: "There's a five-way intersection in Zagreb. Four of the streets are two-way. One of them turns into an inbound one-way after...30 metres and then you have to take a sharp left or right turn. The right turn will, after 20 metres, take you back to the one of the two-ways of the intersection.

"Combine it with the aggravating habit of Zagreb drivers to cram into any intersection so as not to wait for the next green light and you've got a huge irritation during rush hour. It's just that habit of 'me, me, me' that makes driving in Zagreb such an ulcer-inducing experience."

Featured Comment by Karl: "Looks like a very quiet kind of paradise to me. Here's how the local five-way looks on a Sunday afternoon."

Mike replies: That's true. Waukesha is a pleasant place to live. It's the seventh-largest city in Wisconsin, but it's quiet, friendly, and low-key. There's no tradition locally of aggressive driving, and people tend to be polite and orderly in their cars. They almost seem to go out of their way to wait their turn or be considerate to others. Very little to complain about, really, despite my lampooning of the street layout.

Featured Comment by Nicholas Condon: "I just couldn't stop laughing about this. As hideously awful as it is to navigate the D.C. area (esp. Arlington), this makes it look simple by comparison. The last image, in particular, reduced me to uncontrollable giggling.

"As you mention, the only saving grace, here, must be the Wisconsin drivers. My experiences from my time in Madison taught me that the most common failure mode of the local drivers was excessive politeness, not aggressiveness."

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "They've started to implement roundabouts here in Ottawa and the city developed this animation to instruct people how to use them. It's entertaining in its own right."

Featured Comment by Adam Lanigan: "As a transportation engineer/planner myself, I read this with equal measures of interest, stupefaction, comedy, and terror. I pity the poor sod who will eventually tackle untangling these knots, though he may someday be carried on shoulders as the conquering hero. Or at least given a quiet attaboy before returning to the breach. Soldier on, brother."

Sporting Note (OT)

TOP Sportswire—Just in case you don't follow tennis (and who doesn't not follow tennis these days? Even I don't, and I try), you have an opportunity to watch history in the making this afternoon, if you happen not to be otherwise occupied at 4 p.m. Eastern Time.

Novak Djokovic is having a year of years.

As Sports Illustrated puts it: "Nadal is all that stands between Djokovic and one of the greatest individual seasons in tennis history, a campaign that would rank favorably with Rod Laver in 1969, Jimmy Connors in 1974, John McEnroe in 1984 and Roger Federer in 2006. The 24-year-old Serb is 63-2 with nine titles and can become just the sixth man to win three majors in the same year, joining such esteemed company as Laver, Connors, Mats Wilander, Federer and Nadal."*

Novak Djokovic. Photo from his official website.

His comeback against Federer on Saturday was one of the greatest in the history of the game, against one of the greatest players in the game. Down two sets, Djokovic (it's pronounced "Jock-oh-vitch" by Serbians and "joke-oh-vitch" by Anglophone announcers) came back, then faced down two match points with Federer serving. Awesome. Epic. Barely believable. (Of course, I missed it. And I meant to watch.)

It's never a foregone conclusion against the great Spaniard, of course, but Djokovic has beaten Nadal five straight this year, all in tournament finals. It's as close to being owned as Nadal has ever been. A Nadal victory today—as astonishing as this might sound—would be essentially an upset. He has a lot to prove; if he does it, that will be something to see too.

Worth watching today you have the chance. An athlete having this kind of year doesn't happen very often in any sport.

In the U.S., it's on CBS.

Mike

*This seems to be wrong, now that I think of it. Don Budge won the Grand Slam in 1938. Laver did it twice, which I guess is covered by naming him once, but it still doesn't seem right to lump him in with the group that has won three majors without saying "at least" in front of "three majors," since the Grand Slam consists of winning all four majors. So why no love for Budge? Because he was an amateur? That was the thing to be in those days.

UPDATE: CBS is not even airing it in my market. I now officially hate my CBS affiliate.

Have to watch it online, which is annoying because I don't quite have the bandwidth. Must get cable...and cable modem....

UPDATE #2: Djokovic won, 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (3-7), 6-1. Very curious final. Sort of a redux of Wimbledon, which followed the same pattern. Djokovic completely dominated in the first two sets, then Nadal fought ferociously and took the third to a tiebreaker, which he won handily. At about that time Dkojovic started having trouble with a strained muscle in his back, getting massages on the changeover and needing a medical timeout. With Djokovic on the ropes and Nadal resurgent, you would have thought that the fourth set would have been Nadal's, or at least close. Not so. Djokovic broke him early, and then again later, and won easily. By the final games Nadal had essentially given up, to a degree I've seldom seen, standing flat-footed while watching Djokovic's passing shots.

Which made it quite awkward when the interviewer after the game opened with some canned bull about how Nadal never gives up no matter what...odd in that we had just watched him give up. Makes you wonder which match the interviewer had been watching.

I have to believe Nadal just doesn't think he can win against Djokovic. He's 0-6 against Djokovich this year, all in finals. Given how dominant Nadal has looked at times over the years—like nothing can beat him—this is pretty amazing.

I ended up watching the match online, which was fine—the early stop-and-start bandwidth problems eventually disappeared. The big problem were the horrible announcers, who were pretty awful, blustering and blathering on and on with ridiculous comments, seemingly half of which were wrong. Where's Bud Collins when you need him? (Which reminds me, I don't care for NBC much, either.)

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OT: A Brief Note to the Still-Suffering

At every AA or NA meeting, a word of sympathy or prayer is usually spoken on behalf of the "still-suffering" alcoholic or addict—those who haven't had their eyes opened yet and are not yet trying to kick their habit.

Today is my 21st anniversary clean and sober. I got out of detox and rehab at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on September 9th, 1990, so September 10th, 1990, was Day One of being sober on my own.

If you're not there yet and you need to be, get there—go to a meeting. Not tomorrow; today. If you've been trying, keep trying. I know how hard it is. At a meeting you'll find a lot of others who know how hard it is too.

It's worth it. I used to say that being an addict and/or a drunk just tilts the graph-line of your life downward—things get worse and worse, no matter who you are, no matter how strong you think you ought to be. Quitting isn't a panacea—it won't automatically make you rich and strong and loved and secure and respected and happy and content with your lot in life. All it does is gradually tilt the graph line back upwards again...and things get slowly better and better.

It's really true. It really does. I'm living proof.

Mike

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Open Mike: All-Time Best-Looking Roadsters

I'm a nut about roadsters. And what's a roadster? Automotive style designations are notoriously shifty (witness the witless recent fad for the name "four-door coupe," which is like saying "Nikon EOS"). But if you ask me, I'd say a roadster is any small, two-seater, open-topped car where some degree of sportiness is either implied or achieved.

Like the perfect camera, the perfect roadster doesn't exist. As with the perfect camera, people keep trying.

What follows is a rather extemporaneous list of my favorite-looking roadsters. Not all of them have high performance, or are (or were) popular, or are even the best variant of their model or line. But they all look muy fabuloso. (As with aesthetics in every sphere, disagreement on that score is expected and assumed.)

Because some people don't like car posts on their photo blog, I've continued this after a break. (If you click through, though, you're no longer allowed to complain.)

Truer Words

Wise words observed on a plaque in a Maine gift emporium:

"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for one day. Teach a man to fish...

Recombobulation

Well, that was a bust. I got all the way to the gate at the airport this morning before learning that my flight was delayed (for unscheduled maintenance, I presume—the weather here is halcyon) and United Airlines with all its planes and people and corporate might could not get me to O'Hare in time to make my connection.

So I'm back home for another 24 hours. The trip to and fro' the airport, for naught but a sharp stab of disappointment, cost me $110. That's what I get for trying to save the cost of long-term parking for a week. Saving money usually costs me money; I tend to be star-crossed that way. This is far from the first time that's happened.

Two consolations: as a fan of entertaining writing—something I occasionally attempt to perpetrate myself—I discovered this lovely little takedown of the TV show "TMZ" by one James Parker, in the current issue of The Atlantic, née The Atlantic Monthly, which is what I will call it till I die (I suppose there is a possibility that it is no longer in fact a monthly, but I think a better guess is that some committee decided that a shorter, snappier name is more modish) which I bought at the airport newsstand for the flight that was not to be. I would have laughed out loud at James Parker's nimble skewering ("Harvey—a small man, but an enormous parasite") except that I had to observe standard public behavior because I was in the airport, eating the world's most expensive former bagel. I could tell from the shape that it was originally a bagel. I would have had some choice words for the fraudulent fellow who baked it, except that he's probably retired and moved to Florida by now. Four-dollar bagels are bad, and stale bagels are bad, but $4 stale bagels are bad x bad.

And the other consolation? Believe it or not, this was my first trip through post-9/11 airport security (I don't travel much), and, after having my hands swabbed (the only thing that showed up were traces of ancient, phthysic, fossilizing bagel), I put my belt and my shoes back on underneath a large sign that said RECOMBOBULATION AREA. I don't appreciate useless trips to the airport, but it was almost worth it to find the opposite of "discombobulation" doing normal everyday utilitarian duty. I was most pleased to reflect, as I recombobulated myself, that discombobulate was indeed exactly what had just been done to me as I made my way through security. Perfect fit.

So—a bit more TOP today, and the rest of the time I will spend watching iPad2 tutorials on Lynda.com and trying to figure out how to load some pictures on the thing to show to my relatives, when I get to where I should have been going today.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jeff: "You must not subscribe to the Journal Sentinel..."

Ctein's 200th Column: Reality is Overrated (OT)

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE") with some of his photographs

By Ctein

Welcome to the Bicentennial Celebration: This Is Ctein Column Number 200*! I felt like I needed to do something really special with this column. So, I'm going to mess with your heads. Lots.

Really.

If you thought my columns last Christmas were messing with your heads...

The Unseen World

The Unseen Universe Gets Much Weirder (Very OT!) 

...this time it's going to be a lot, lot worse.

Let me begin by explaining to you the idea of "local reality," a term used by physicists.

The first word is "local": in physics, this is actually a very strong word. For example, I can say the moon is globally a sphere, and you can confirm that for yourself just by looking at it. "Global" means that it's true taking the broad viewpoint. If I were to say the moon was "locally" a sphere, it would mean that it looks spherical at every size; no matter how close I got it would remain a perfectly shiny, perfectly spherical marble. "Local" means that we consider something to hold true everywhere, all the time, on all scales.

"Reality" means something very specific, but it's fairly commonsensical. Local reality has three characteristics:

• Causality: things happen for a reason. We may not know what the reason is, but still.... If my teacup suddenly takes off and starts flying around the room, I assume it happens for a reason. Maybe it's alien influence, maybe it's because someone put drugs in my teacup (I'll get back to that), maybe it's because I have poltergeists, maybe it's a miracle delivered to me personally by God. Something made it happen. It's hard to object to that.

• Objectivity: the things that we measure that we think are real really do have an existence independent of our imaginings. That teacup flying around the room? Unless someone has drugged my tea or I've gone insane, I assume it is there. If I make a photograph of it, I assume the photograph is real and what was photographed is real. If the tree falls in the forest, it does make the air move in a way we would hear as sound if we were there, even when no one is there.

(Lots of aspects of the world are subjective. If I ask you if you like pepperoni pizza, your answer is an objectively observable utterance, but your like or dislike of it is not.)

Like causality, objectivity is hard to disagree with. You can construct all kinds of philosophies where we are all living inside our own dreams or someone else's simulation, etc. But how many of us really believe that?

• Induction: this is a little more subtle, but we take it for granted. It's the belief that there is basically a logic to things. If we say that A always causes B and B always causes C, then A always causes C. Induction implies repeatability, which is at the heart of making any kind of an observation. I push the teacup off the table, and it falls to the floor. If I do it again (causality), and the teacup is really there and I really did push it (objectivity), then it should fall to the floor again...unless something has changed that causes it to fly around the room (back to causality).

That's what physicists mean when they talk about local reality, and it would be very hard for most of us to disagree that this is a quite sensible description of our basic experience with the world.

There's a slight problem. It's wrong. We can prove that the universe does not obey local reality and that at least one of our three assumptions has to be in error. We can do experiments in which things happen that are simply impossible according to local reality. I shall explain:

Simple logic can tell you how certain kinds of experiments will come out. Suppose I want to do a survey of cereal boxes in the supermarket. I'm going to count the total number of cereal boxes. Then I'm going to count the number of boxes that have sugar added. Finally I'm going to count the number of boxes that have no added sweeteners of any kind (those could be artificial sweeteners, sweet bits of candy or fruit, etc.; they might not be sugar). What can you tell me about the results?

It should be obvious that number of boxes that have added sugar plus the number of boxes that have no additional sweeteners of any kind must be no more than the total number of boxes of cereal on the shelf.

In general terms, Ctein's Inequality: [total items] is greater than or equal to [items with A] + [items without A thru Z]

This statement is not bulletproof. It does require some basic logic—those postulates of local reality. If the cereal boxes aren't really there or if counting them does not produce a predictable, reliable, and reproducible result, then my inequality can fail. But we would expect that in a normal, sane world, it will work.

Houston, we have a problem
Now, back to the world of physics labs rather than supermarkets.

Half a century ago, an amazing physicist named John Bell did this kind of logical analysis, figuring out what sorts of results we could expect from experiments. He came up with one called Bell's Inequality, a more sophisticated and useful version of my cereal box inequality. You can look up the details on the web. Its underlying logic demands nothing more than local reality; if that holds, Bell's Inequality applies.

In the late 1970s, a couple of physicists came up with a design for a quantum mechanics experiment that had an odd characteristic. They could calculate, using QM, what the results of the experiment should be. That prediction was in conflict with Bell's Inequality. So, of course, they ran the experiment! I do not know, but I strongly suspect that they were expecting to find a subtle flaw in quantum mechanics this way. No one thinks quantum mechanics is the be-all and end-all of physics, while local reality is awfully fundamental. So I imagine they believed the experiment would show some problem with their calculations which would lead to new, more interesting physics.

The universe threw them (and us) a curveball. Their experimental results matched their quantum mechanical calculations. The results were in violation of Bell's Inequality. In other words, the results were impossible if local reality were true.

Understand the import of that. This is not about whether or not quantum mechanics is right or wrong; quantum mechanics might very well be wrong in some way, although this experiment didn't find it. What this experiment said, though, was that local reality was unquestionably wrong.

Essentially, it was as if I had gone into the supermarket, did my cereal thing and counted that there were 38 boxes of cereal total, 23 of which had added sugar and 19 of which had no added sweeteners of any kind.

Houston, we have a problem.

First and most reasonable hypothesis: their experiment was flawed. Either their measurements were in error in some way, they were not measuring exactly what they thought they were measuring, or other factors they hadn't accounted for were intruding and messing up the experiment. That reasonable assumption hasn't panned out. In the intervening 30 years, the experiment has been refined dozens of times, and run by many different researchers.

With the advances in electronics and measuring devices, it's really at no more advanced a level today than college physics; it it might even be doable in a good high school physics lab. The results are pretty much bulletproof now—and they consistently violate local reality. Furthermore, people have come up with other experiments that measure different kinds of things that also violate Bell's Inequality.

So, it's not just one isolated case where local reality fails, although most of the time it works just fine. Regardless, reality is not supposed to be a sometimes thing. It means that we really don't understand what's going on, that our conceptual model is somehow fundamentally flawed.

So, which of our assumptions is wrong? Objectivity? Causality? Induction? Throwing out any of those makes reality a peculiar, disturbing, and very unfamiliar place. Yet we know that one of those (maybe more than one) isn't always true, it's just usually true.

Wild-ass guess
Physicists lean towards throwing out objectivity; there's already been some thought for doing that in both philosophy and quantum mechanics. But that's entirely an emotional preference born of familiarity; we really don't know. Besides which, throwing out objectivity raises those deep and nasty philosophical questions like Schrödinger's cat, and what effect does an observer have on the whole universe, and what does observer really mean when we are all part of one universe, and even more tie-your-head-in-knots conundrums.

Remarkably, physicists are starting to come up with experiments that can test which of those assumptions is wrong. That work is still in its early phases, and there is not entire agreement on the results, although it is looking like objectivity may be down for the count. Which, even if that's true, doesn't mean it's the only one of our assumptions that falls. If one of them is wrong, maybe all of them are wrong. Mildly scary thought.

What's truly astonishing, though, is that we are entering an era of experimental philosophy. Understanding the fundamental nature of experience and reality used to be limited to the great armchair theorists of our philosophy classes. Now people are actually figuring out physical experiments that may illuminate matters that we thought were entirely beyond the realm of experimentation.

Want to know my utterly wild-ass guess? I think, philosophically, we just plain have it wrong. I think we're in a stage akin to alchemy: we talk about things like "observers," "events," "measurements," and "objects" believing that these are fundamental components of reality. I think we're going to find out that they are philosophical Elementals, the equivalents of earth, air, fire, and water. They are undoubtedly real, but they'll turn out to not be fundamental building blocks of reality.

Like I said, wild-ass. And I wouldn't even try to guess what real philosophical "elements" might look like.

In 50 years, though, I think we will know something. Experimentation proceeds.

Ctein

*(There is a bit of ambiguity in the data; technically this could be construed as anywhere between Column 198 and Column 202. By my arbitrary numbering system, it is 200. It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to....)

Ctein, a physicist by training, is a photographer, parrot aficionado, sci-fi fan, and—as the author of well over 500 articles published in photography magazines over five different decades—perhaps the most experienced phototechnical writer in America. His regular weekly column on TOP, not always confined to matters photographic but usually conventionally reality-based, appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Melv: "Eh?"

Ctein replies: I think "Whaaaaa???" might be more appropriate (g).

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "I like the many-worlds interpretation with no wavefunction collapse , and not just because it was thought up by some other guy named Hugh (Everet). Flip a coin, create a universe unless it turns out that time is running backwards and you are consolidating two possible 'futures' into one 'now' I'm just glad to be in the universe where Ctein writes his off topic pieces about quantum mechanics and not golf. I just don't get golf at all."

Mike replies: It's harder than physics.

What a Way to Have a Bad Day

If you like golf, I hope you didn't miss the finish of the PGA Championship. Spectacular play all day—just some unbelievable shots—and a thrilling finish. Best golf tournament I've seen in a long time.

You have to wonder about sports, though. Previously little-known Jason Dufner had the best tournament of his career, played like Ben Hogan for 68 holes, got more TV face time in the last two days than he's had in his whole career, earned $865,000 for four days' work—and has to be feeling awfully bad tonight.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Pierre Munson: "Mike, I returned last week from participating in an international championship. I did well enough to compete again in the high sixteen competition after the main match. I lost in the first round. It was impossible for me to win the match or the high sixteen competition. The other competitors were just too skilled. I didn't feel bad. I was pleased with the results even though my performance left room for improvement. I don't think that Mr. Dufner should hang his head.

"I also watched the tournament and was thrilled by the level of competition. I always find that the commentators emphasize the winners to the exclusion of the other positions. When I'm not competing, I spend most of my time photographing professional sports. The back stories of those both on and off the podium are often more interesting than the brief summaries which are offered by most of the larger news services.

"The best competitors learn to quickly put any disappointments behind them in order to focus on the next event."

Audio O.T.: From Vinyl to Virtual—Part I

By Ctein

Almost exactly three years ago, Mike wrote about finding (or not finding) stuff in his library, archiving, and so on. Free association combined with his columns about putting in new bookshelves and buying classic stereo gear made me decide to digitize all my AV stuff.

I owned about 500 record albums and 500 CDs. The CDs got listened to almost entirely on my computer or in the car. The vinyl, except for the albums that I'd put on cassette, pretty much never got listened to. I just wasn't playing music in the "living room" anymore, where the stereo, turntable, and speakers were. I doubt that I had listened to more than a dozen albums in five years; the vast majority of them hadn't been played in at least a decade. All that music, losslessly-compressed with full fidelity (flac, natch) would consume about half a terabyte. An iPod would even make the music portable. But what a lot of work.

What pushed me over the edge was the realization that once I digitized all that stuff, I could get rid of it! I don't care about vinyl albums as physical artifacts, as many people do. I only care about the music on them. Which, I must emphasize, wasn't being listened to.

You can figure out how many feet of shelf space all that music and video took up. Plus, I could sell the CDs and the vinyl. I'd clear about a buck apiece on the vinyl, twice that on the CDs. So I'd be getting back about $1500 and a lot of free space in my house! Most of said space (and some of said money) would go for additional bookshelves. Of course.

I figured less than an hour a day of my time would complete the job in a year. Well, that turned out to be totally wrong, as I'll explain. I couldn't just transcribe and convert all those record albums in the background while I was doing other things. It took more than three times as long as I thought it would.

Fortunately, my standards were modest. This is a project at which you can throw huge amounts of money, even into the low five figures, without getting into stupid-rich territory. Each incremental debit of your bank account buys you higher audio quality that is audible with sufficiently good equipment and a sufficiently good ear. Happily, I only wanted the transcriptions to sound at least as good, on equipment that I could afford, as the way the records had for me. No "golden ear" much less "golden equipment." I had an acceptable direct-drive turntable (Akai AP D210) and cartridge (Shure M91ED). I'd buy a new needle for the Shure cartridge and a couple of hard drives. A few hundred bucks.

I turned to Mike for mid-level audio advice and to my friend, Alexia, for the really tough stuff. You know how much I know about photography relative to someone who just bought their first camera last week? Well, that's Alexia's level of knowledge about computer music and audio compared to mine. Back in the mid-'80s when I was dreaming about having the power of a Cray to do image processing, she was dreaming about it for music analysis and synthesis.

Mike suggested I replace my whole cartridge. His recommendation, for less than $100, an Ortofon OMB 10. It was a winner; distinctly better sound than my Shure, which was not a bad cartridge.

I asked Alexia about data rates. Did I need to go to 96 kHz or even 192 kHz instead of 48? And what bit depth? At my middlin' level of quality, Alexia said I wouldn't be able to hear any difference between 48 kHz and 96. On the other hand, she strongly recommended 24 bits per sample. The logic is much the same as using 16 bits per color instead of eight for image processing. You can get by with eight bits of color if everything is just perfect and you're not massaging the data much. Make substantial changes, though, and there may be noticeable gaps in your histograms. The same logic applies to 16-bit audio. 24-bit ensures that you've got margin to work with when you process the audio files, and it means you don't have to be anywhere as fussy about getting the peak level set perfectly.

Alexia also told me not to trust the A-D converters built into any of my computers. They might be good...but probably not. The problem? Timing. As the old joke goes it's...

...

...Everything.

48 kHz is hardly a fast sampling rate for modern computers, but unless the interval between samples is extremely precise (fractions of a microsecond) and the sampling window kept narrow, phase and harmonic distortion creep in. No matter how fast you're sampling, poor timing will make it sound crappy.

Off to buy an A-D converter. FireWire, of course; for real-time data recording, don't want to trust a CPU-mastered bus like USB. At my level of quality, there was plausible gear under $200 from M-Audio and PreSonus. The latter's Inspire-1394 looked like just what I would need. It had audio line inputs on channels three and four, built-in RIAA compensation, and it was powered off the FireWire bus.

A mistake, at least on my Mac. First was that the built-in RIAA compensation did a really lousy job, introducing horrendous hum. Yeah, ground loop problems, but running some external gounding leads from cases-to-cases eliminating that...until I turned on the RIAA function. So it was off to buy an RIAA preamp. Fortunately they're not expensive.

Then I discovered a modest incompatibility with Audacity, the excellent freeware audio processing software. Audacity can handle input on channels three and four, but some important things like the peaking VU meters don't work. There was no way to map Inspire's line audio to channels one and two. So I switched to CuBase LE, which came bundled with the converter. Its VU meters sucked; it also had much poorer controls for cleaning up and editing the transcription than Audacity. Worst of all, I discovered it (or maybe the Inspire, could never sort that out) had an annoying tendency to lose timing synchronization if I was using the computer for much of anything else. Audio would stutter or drop out for anywhere from a fraction of a second to minutes, mid-recording. This was not a basic CPU or FireWire bus load problem; I had much extra capacity. It was a prioritization problem. Still, it meant I couldn't do the transcribing entirely in the background while doing my normal work, and it also meant I had to go back and re-record a lot of licorice after I discovered this.

Maybe all the low-to-midpriced converters have such problems. Maybe it was unique to my Mac. I bludgeoned the Inspire into doing the job and doing it well, but there were so many glitches along the way that if I had it to do over again, I'd buy something else.

Learning curve aside, the work went quickly; in spare time, I could copy 3–6 albums a day. I carefully washed each platter before transcribing it, cleaned and dusted each side when I put it on the turntable, and cleaned the stylus between sides. My records had never sounded cleaner. But they were still pretty noisy, compared to digital, anyway. I knew that was going to really bother me if I mixed together tracks from both media in my playlists.

That's when things started to go very sloooowwwwwwly.

Tune in next time to find out how I got to the right answer, Adobe Audition, by the long way around. Wish I'd known about that program when I started the project.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays. Note: Part II might be delayed for a few days if Mike is still on hiatus. We apologize for the interruption in service!

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Featured Comment by Nico Burns: "I wonder what the legal status of downloading a vinyl rip of a vinyl you own is...because there are high-quality rips of almost everything [i.e., on the internet —Ed.] if you know where to look."

Featured Comment by Robin P: "For the odd bits of my vinyl collection that it's hard to find on CD I had a Philips CD recorder connected to the 'tape out' of the amplifier. I recorded to CD-RW, converted to .wav on the PC and used a program called Groove Mechanic to clean up hiss, rumble and clicks. Reasonable results but no competition for many recent 'remastered' CD releases...and the whole process is so time-consuming that after initial enthusiasm the CD recorder lay unused for years and I recently sold it on eBay. Spending time rejuvenating old tape recordings of musical friends seems more justified, similar to breathing new life into old negs with a scanner and image manipulation software."

America in a Nutshell

I'm just sayin'.

Mike

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Open Mike: Classical Music Edition

For all those who say all my off-topic posts are about cars and horse racing, take this.

Today's subject: classical music. A subject I know nothing about. I went through a "classical period" that lasted well over ten years, but I mainly experienced the music rather than learning much about it. That period began in the '80s, preceding, just slightly, the introduction of the CD.

First item of business, the world's best music book title—I saw this last night in the bookstore and had to stifle a laugh. They nailed that.

Following the advice of wise friends, I am saving both Alaska and opera for my old age. (In case you're just skimming casually, that's another way of saying I've never been to Alaska and don't listen to opera.)

Control and perfection
Anybody have a favorite quartet? ("Quartet" as in the group, I mean.) Like I said, I don't have any knowledge of, or training in, classical music or stringed instruments, so I don't know where I get off pretending I can tell the difference. But I've always had favorites anyway. My latest infatuation is for the Verdi Quartet (Susanne Rabenschlag and Peter Stein, violins; Karin Wolf, viola; and Didier Poskin, 'cello). Apparently they've been around for a good long while, not that I knew. They have a light hand, a singing tone, and a gentle way in Schubert. Try their Quintet in C on Hänssler Classics—Martin Lovett joining in on the second 'cello. The music is a great masterpiece that everyone knows, or should. I suppose the Verdi's is not as good a version as the wonderful (and far more famous) older version on EMI by the Alban Berg Quartet and Heinrich Schiff, notable for its rapt control and almost otherwordly perfection. I made many great prints to that disc in darkrooms in years gone by. (I found I needed music without words to print by.) Nothing like it on headphones, either, when you can really concentrate on listening.

(As an aside, anyone who loves Schubert will get a kick out of Too Beautiful for You [Trop Belle Pour Toi ], the Bertrand Blier comedy with Gérard Depardieu.)

Of course the big problem with bowed stringed instruments is that they never sound quite as good in recordings as they do in real life. It's the opposite of what they lately call "classic rock," where the recording is typically articulate and communicative and the live performances thrashy and dinny and too loud to hear. Hearing a live string quartet is an experience worth seeking out.

Hungarian violinist Vilmos Tátrai, of the eponymous quartet

Papa Haydn
Of course you can't listen live to the ones that are gone. By far my favorite quartet of all time is the Tatrai, from Hungary. I love the Haydn string quartets above all others, and have ever since I started listening to classical in 1982 or so. I've got two complete sets, neither of which I've listened to completely. The versions I've listened to most intently (and repeatedly) are by the Tatrai. But I've never bought more than the odd disk here and there of the Tatrai's traversal, because it was always too expensive—these recordings have never not been expensive, virtually since they came out on vinyl. The personnel changed with the music, but as far as I know the Haydn band typically included Vilmos Tátrai and István Várkonyi, violins; György Konrád, viola; and Ede Banda on 'cello.

The quartets are available on iTunes now, for what seem like the most reasonable prices I've ever seen—generally $19.99 for six quartets. Try the "Erdody" Quartets Opus 76 if you want a place to start. I've been immersed in the Op. 54/55, amazed all over again at the brilliance and beauty of this nearly ideal matching of music and musicians. And don't make the mistake of hitting the go button and letting it run; I'd recommend listening to one quartet by itself several times before moving on to the next one. It's not actually background music.

Music of the thunderstorm
And lastly, a plug for what I think is one of the greatest classical music pieces ever: Bach's BWV 1052. I have a deathless love for this piece, and (despite buying yet another version last week) have never found a better rendition than Trevor Pinnock's. Roiling skies and the thunder of the gods. One of the greatest of the great masterpieces; Robert Schumann, who was a music critic as well as a composer, thought so. If you don't know it yet, a download will be the best $2.97 you'll spend this week.

So much to enjoy.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear on Sundays.

UPDATE: Pak Wan sent along this link to a video of the Alban Berg. Terrific. Gives a fine sense of what seeing a live quartet can be like.

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Featured [partial] Comment by patrick: "Very Funny—I just spent a month in Alaska while my wife sang with the opera company there...."

Featured Comment by Erlik: "The best summation of opera ever:

'"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin," and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!," although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.' (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade.)"

Featured [partial] Comment by Hugh Crawford: "You don't listen to the opera , you go to the opera. It's like the difference between sushi and fishsticks. Attending the opera is transcendent, listening to recordings of opera is kind of annoying. A soprano friend of my wife had to take martial arts training for one of her roles where she literally got thrown across the stage while singing, and last year at the Met the chorus was performing a cavalry battle while rappelling down a stage filling video screen showing the battle field from overhead. A couple years before that I saw Placido Domingo in "Girl of the Golden West" staged with real horses one of which he was riding while singing.

"Opera is a lot closer to say Iggy Pop than you might imagine."

Open Mike: Quotes

The Preakness: Good horse race yesterday. Shackleford [picture and info], who came in fourth at the Derby and is a grandson of 1990 Kentucky Derby winner Unbridled, was right on the rabbit's neck at the outset, then took the lead at the top of the stretch and never gave it up.

I was rooting for him, because of all the prancing and dancing and sweating he was doing on the way into the gate—he looked like he had energy to burn and you just knew he would come out fast. And did they ever, he and Flashpoint, the sprinter—the opening quarter was one of the fastest ever. Of course I had no idea if Shackleford would or could go the distance.

If you didn't see the race, well, I know better than to link to a YouTube video, but I can't tell you not to go to YouTube and search.

Derby winner Animal Kingdom got way back in the field—I mean he was practically off in a different zip code at one point—and charged all the way to second, but didn't have the speed in the final furlongs to catch and pass Shackleford. (All the pundits were saying he would have if he'd had more room, but I don't think so. He wasn't gaining any more in the last few strides.) Fun run to watch anyway.

Kimmyville had the number on this one, way back in April. Favorite quote, under the header "Why I like this horse": "He's a big chestnut colt. Yeah, I bet on horses for reasons like that...and as every expert knows, the folks who wager on colors and names are the same who cash the most tickets...." My favorite horse was a big chestnut too.

The race brings up the now-nearly-eternal question: will there ever be another Triple Crown winner? I wish I knew the significance of what I was living through in the era of Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed. It was more special than I realized at the time.

After the race, I got to catch the last 40 minutes or so of Ctein's ReTouch Pro live webinar, and even the portion I saw was fascinating. I like the format. Did anybody see the whole thing? Any comments?

From its porcine weight to its bloated motor and even down to its oversized wheels, the BMW X6 M perfectly embodies all that is worst about current automotive fashions. Photo by Brian Vance.

World's Fattest Car: In the comments to my "Fat Mustang" post last week, I noted that high gas prices do not necessarily lead to more efficient cars, because it makes conspicuous consumption of gasoline (a.k.a. petrol) into a status symbol. As the need for efficient cars ratchets up globally, the rich are buying cars that are fatter, more musclebound, and less efficient that ever. But I still got lots of chuckles from this passage in Motor Trend, in an article called "Three Loko: We Sample a Trio of the World's Weirdest Cars," by Jonny Lieberman:

If the four-door Porker [the Porsche Panamera —Ed.] is the fall of Rome, the BMW X6 M is Incitatus, the horse Caligula appointed senator. This beast makes no sense. Consider that the X6 M weighs nearly 5200 pounds, yet comes with a 555-horsepower twin-turbo V-8. That's 55 horses more than the Porsche. All that grunt combined with such a chiseled and aggressive exterior makes the most controversial M badge ever a true highway menace. It's a real middle finger of a monster blowing up your rearview mirror....

But you have to wonder, did BMW go far enough? The X6 M weighs 2.5 tons and seats only four while returning very poor fuel economy (14.6 mpg on our watch). If that's not anti-social, I don't know what is. But why stop there? If you're going to be the bane of the environmental movement, if everyone who sees you driving your own personal attack truck is instantly, automatically going to hate your guts, best to keep your right foot down, right? Why not make the X6 M a single seater? Better yet, why not a single seater with center steering? And instead of doors, how about a roof hatch? There's way too much useable storage space (25.6 cubic feet, almost 10 cubic feet more than in the spacious Panamera). BMW ought to—I think—fill the rear of this gnarly puppy with lead. Seriously, why not?

I think the appropriate infantile internet initialism is "roflmao." The BMW X6 M gets the laurel wreath as the world's fattest bastard of a car, putting the more modest Mustang to shame in that regard.

Riddle: By the bye, the answer to yesterday's moral dilemma is no, you can't. Although I appreciate the lively discussion. Two of our readers who are arguably closest to the art world had their thumbs on the pulse of this one. JSL said:

Easy answer: no.

Even leaving aside the ethical issues, it's too risky. These things always get out, especially since any collector untrustworthy enough to propose such a thing is too untrustworthy to keep it a secret. Moreover, it would be easy to date the latter picture (for one thing, the colors won't have faded yet...). If you get caught doing something like that, your reputation will take a considerable hit—and when you're an artist working in a medium as contingent as photography, in a market based entirely on perception, your reputation is really all you have to sell.

And Ken Tanaka wrote:

'The dilemma: would you do it?' Absolutely not. Aside from the glaring ethical issues the top of the art world is actually a very small worldwide community and collectors tend to be social and loose-lipped. News of your cheat would certainly reach your gallery very soon, at which time you'd be certainly tossed onto the street and probably also sued, depending on your contractual agreement with your reps...whose reputations would now also be at stake. Getting another rep at the top end would probably be very tough, too. You'd become a pariah.

The buyer would be a dope, too. Increasingly, the provenance of highly-prized photographic prints is becoming a big factor in resales. (I have been involved in just such provenance work myself recently.) You can bet that the other ten prints are accounted for.

You can do as I recommend and not limit your editions in the first place, but if you do you have to abide by your decision. (It's still a true dilemma for me, but I think the moral of the post is, don't put yourself in that position.) My problem with it, as I've explained before, is that limiting hardly ever benefits the artist, and it seriously disadvantages the artist only in the statistically unlikely event that you get really lucky and do really well with some of your work. Not worth it, in my view. My position also derives from the fact that limits on editions with photography are not integral to the medium, but that's an aesthetic position, not an ethical one.

Lee Friedlander's my hero on this issue. (Friedlander refuses to limit his prints because he feels it's undemocratic.)

In any event, I appreciate many readers' sentiments when they advocate giving the various PTB in the art world the middle finger, but the time to give the art world the raised middle finger is when someone's hectoring you to limit your editions, not when your own bad decision comes home to kick you in the wallet years later. That's my take.

...Although, I am in the process of hatching a Big Scheme, capital B capital S, and it does involve limiting editions, so there's a good chance I'm going to go directly against my own advice. I'll fill you in in due course, of course.

Have a nice day! Hope it's as beautiful where you are as it is here.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of not-necessarily-on-topic posts that appears, if it appears at all, on Sundays.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I have a modest collection of photographs that includes a number of famous names, and some not-so-famous, and three things I would not do are:

1. Buy a photo on which I would have to remit part of a later sales price to the artist. It's not that I'm cheap, it's just that I refuse to get myself tangled up in some kind of contractual deal that could go on for decades and in the end, screw up my estate and my heirs—what happens when both the original owner and the photographer are dead? The two estates sue each other?
2. Buy any kind of artwork that has a copyright notice on the front of it. They do nothing but defile the artwork. If the photographer wants to put a copyright notice on the back of the photo, that's fine with me. I nearly returned a famous photo by Cartier-Bresson because he signed his name too large. By the time I got around to buying one of the uneditioned prints, apparently having his name big was part of the deal. I wound up keeping the photo, but the signature still messes it up.
3. Pay a lot extra for vintage or editioned prints. I'm interested in the image, and having the image made by the original artist, but I don't care how many he's made or whether he made them later.

"I think if I really desperately wanted an image (a feeling I haven't yet experienced, as opposed to liking an image very much) and if I were forced to pay extra because it was editioned, I'd be very very unhappy with the gallery if I found out additional prints were made. I wouldn't like the image less, but I'd be unhappy with the fact that to get it, I was forced to pay for what amounts to a 'guarantee' of scarcity. Like any other guarantee, I'd want to have it observed, and if enough money was involved, I'd try to recover the money if the guarantee wasn't observed. I think other people would too, and would suggest that this might have a dire effect on the photographer's overall ability to sell prints."

An Additional Comment by John Camp: "On further reflection: The critical mistake we're making in this discussion is to assume that a rational human being would pay $3 million for a photograph.

"In fact, that is not what is being done at all. No image is worth that much, to anyone. In fact, many images, including famous ones, are  essentially as well-seen in good books as in original prints. Is that $3 million 'original vintage print' worth approximately 20 times the cost of that gorgeous Panamera Turbo, possibly the best production car in the world, mentioned in the same blog article? Well, the print is, for now, but not the image—a critical distinction.

"What actually is being sold for $3 million is a physical object, which is also a reliable store of value, an investment vehicle. This vehicle makes it possible to transfer a sum of money downstream in time, to be cashed at a later date, when needed. The key, as it is with gold, is scarcity; an investor in a Cindy Sherman print is relying on the guarantee of scarcity to provide a hedge against inflation, business reversals, or market conflicts. As long as the print is valued and remains scarce, the investment may safely be transferred down through the years; and if the art vehicle is carefully chosen, may increase in value, even after inflation. In this way, it behaves more or less like gold.

"There is some risk involved, as there is with gold: if more standard investments become to be perceived as safer, or more lucrative, the value of Shermans could tumble, as the value of gold did after 1980.

"There is another risk, however. If Cindy Sherman were to make more prints of the same image, the prints would stop behaving like gold, and would start behaving like fiat currency (paper money).

"As investors began to catch on that the scarcity guarantee was weakening, they would find that the Sherman investment value was declining—they'd be suffering from an onset of Sherman inflation. That is, against a set store of value—say, Porsche Panamera Turbos—they might only get ten cars for a print. As the guarantee weakened further, with Sherman running the old wet line as fast as she could, soon you'd reach Porsche / photo parity, and then, go off the edge. People would be demanding 10, 100, 1,000, 100,000 Shermans for a Porsche. You'd have hyper-inflation, and we'd all be standing on the street corners selling apples.

"So, that's why you can't violate limited edition pledge: you could bring down the economy.

"What's needed is a Central Photo Bank, which would guarantee the scarcity of certain printed images, and would have the legal right to move against counterfeiters, or people who would break the editioning pledge. You could even issue secondary investment vehicles based on  the store of guaranteed images (we could call them 'bonds').

"Finally, I would like to say—with all due modesty, I believe—that I would make a pretty damn good Ben Bernanke."

Judgment Day

So, here we are. It's the Day of Atonement, here at last, here at last.

I don't mind so much, except I was hoping it would be more...probative. Which of the following pertains?

• It's Judgment Day. If you're still here when it's over, that means God spared you, i.e., he likes you.

• It's the Rapture. That means that all the good Christians get whisked up, and all the people remaining on Earth have been left behind. I.e., if you're still here on Sunday it means God doesn't like you.

I wish this were more clear. I have a feeling I'm still going to be confused when this is all over.

And if, on Sunday, I'm still here and all the Christians are still here, what does that mean? I think it will mean the Rapture happened and He didn't take any of our raggedy sinning behinds off to heaven.

Possibly that's the wrong conclusion, but it seems logical.

Mike

P.S. Don't forget Ctein's Webinar is this afternoon at 4:00 (CDT). I can't watch it because it conflicts with the Preakness. Assuming, naturally, that 4:00 CDT is still pre-Armageddon.

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Featured Comment by Chuck Albertson: "I'm packing a couple extra rolls of film in my bag today, just in case."

Featured Comment by Ben: "Of course it's the end of days...my brother-in-law is getting married!!!"

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "This all happened before, in the 1840s to be specific, when a charismatic lay preacher, William Miller, began spreading the word that the Second Coming was to be October 22, 1844. One can only imagine his followers' disappointment when the world did not, in fact, end. Miller kept moving the goalposts further down the field with new predicted Raptures, until he and his followers became the object of widespread derision. There's a great Simpsons episode that mercilessly mocks the entire event.

"Miller came from the 'burned over district,' the area of rural central/western New York State that was repeatedly swept by religious fervor from the mid 1700s through the end of the 19th century. This area gave birth to Mormonism, to John Humphrey Noyes' bizarre utopian cult (utopian for him at least; he pushed polygamy and had scores of 'wives') and all kinds of squirrely religious movements. I've lived here all my life, and there's still an undercurrent of religious mania through the local culture. This new version of 'Rapturemania' is just the latest in a long line of holy hucksterism."

Featured Comment by Robert P: "Apparently Camping is my sister's landlord. She didn't even ask him for a cheap deal on rent for after today—I reckon she missed a trick there...."

Is The Ford Mustang...Fat? (Open Mike)

Ford Mustang. I believe this is a 2012.

I got to drive a 2011 Ford Mustang GT a few days ago. It's distinguished by a superb all-new 412-hp V8 engine, and it's an experience. A flatbelly in a FWD riceburner tried to jump us at a stoplight and the V8 let out a big BLAP-BLAP-BLAP-BLAP-BLAP roar and slapped him down—as if to say, "I eat Evo for breakfast, sucker." (We needed the soundtrack from Ferris Bueller's Day Off intoning, "Oh, Yeah.") I suspect half the attraction of a V8 like the GT's is the awesome noise it makes.

I've never owned a V8 car. I don't know for sure, but as I cast through my mental filing cabinet I don't think I've ever driven a V8 car before, except for one—my father's beige Buick Electra 225, the "Big Beige," which, near as I can figure, would have been either a 1972, '73, or '74 [picture]. Known as "land yachts," the deuce-and-a-quarters (which, fittingly, more or less coincided with peak oil production in the U.S.) were fully as big as the most ridiculous SUVs, just shaped differently—longer, wider, flatter.

My idea of a great car at the time was a BMW 2002Tii [picture] of sainted memory—my dad and I test-drove it, and that brief experience probably made more of an impression on me than any car has before or since. Dad had owned a dark blue Mustang fastback [picture] in 1965, but he got rid of it, mainly because he got it stuck (or perhaps I should say "it got him stuck") in the woods when he was trying to leave a salt lick out for the deer in the ravine opposite our house, and because he hated bucket seats (also one of the reasons he didn't like the little BMW).

As of 2011, the Mustangs are a different breed of horse*. Both the V8 and the V6 engines are all-new, and both new engines are superlative for their cost—the V6 especially. The V6 is the first engine in the world to put out 300+ horsepower and score a highway mileage rating of more than 30 mpg in the car it comes in. Like the original Taurus SHO, it makes the current V6 Mustang a car you'd buy just for its engine.

Of course, I approach the whole world aesthetically...and I just can't help thinking that the car I drove is just...well...a little...fat. Its bulging snout contributes to its aggressive look, for sure, but there's also just a whole lot of car in that car. Amusingly, and suspiciously, Ford doesn't specify curb weight in the car specs on its website, but other sites peg it at a portly 3,605 lbs. That's only half a ton less than my father's early '70s land yacht—and half a ton more than his '65 Mustang Fastback. (The '72 2002Tii scales in at a mere 2,262 lbs.)

Coach McCarthy

Of course, maybe the Mustang is right in step. We Americans seem to be getting more portly, too. Take our Coach for instance. We love Mike McCarthy here in 'Sconsin. He's a fine guy, smart and unpretentious, down to earth but obviously very successful. And I'm the last person to criticize anyone for the way they happen to look. But let's be honest: he's not...er...dainty, is he? Coach is the fireplug type. So let's just put it this way, before I stray too far into political incorrectness: if the 2011 Mustang GT were a person, it would be a Mike McCarthy. Doncha think? I'm just sayin'.

It's probably impossible for the Mustang to go back in time entirely to the original's 2400–2800 curb-weight range. But my impression is that the ol' Bullet could sure stand to lose a few. Like most of the guys who drive 'em, probably. Can't exclude myself from that club, unfortunately.

But to get back to the kind of car I like best—a present-day, more extreme counterpart of the early '70s 2002—take a look at this video, especially the marvelous little snippet at about 2:18 (start it a few seconds earlier if you're only going to watch the snip)—if you're a car pilot, seeing that is guaranteed to make you feel better. I've watched it about eighteen times. Yowza.

Mike

*Did you know that the only difference between a "pony" and a "horse" is size? That's all. You might say the Pony Car has become a Horse Car.

(P.S. The usual apologies if anyone can't see the video. It's called "Caterham R500 vs Ducati by autocar.co.uk" if you'd like to search for it elsewhere.)

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Leslie Ashe:

"Your comments about the BMW 2002tii reminded me of my days photographing rally cars in Ireland and U.K. Above is a picture of what was probably the ultimate in this machine—a fully lightened 2002tii on the Donegal International Rally 1975 driven by German Rally ace Achim Warmbold. It was a right-hand corner and the tail is just drifting out. An impressive sight and sound. Pentax Spotmatic 1000 (200mm lens) on Tri-X rated at 800 ISO. No auto metering or focusing in those days!"

Featured Comment by Christian: "It's seemed to me that every generation of Mustang gets chubbier aesthetically."

Mike replies: Yes, an endemic, pan-manufacturer problem with car models. The Honda Civic is now bigger than the early Accords, for instance.

Featured Comment by Joe: "In the mid-'60s, my father was president of the local chapter of the Jaycees, and the group decided to raffle a car to raise money. Through the local Ford dealer, somehow, they got a hold of one of the very first Mustangs, just before they were officially released to the public—so this must have been spring or summer 1964, just as I was about to enter fifth grade. And one weekend afternoon just before the car was given to the raffle winner, my father took me for a spin in the thing, top down, through the mountain roads around our town. I'm not really a car guy, and I have only a few vivid memories of that drive, but I can tell you I've never stopped finding those early Mustangs beautiful and wonderful machines."

Open Mike: Worry

I'm going to be a bit off my game this week. Truth to tell, I was a bit off last week, too.

Many of you probably know how attached we can get to our furry friends—or feathered friends, or whatever. I mean the pets we love.

My favorite snap of Lu-fers is the first picture of her I ever took

Mine is a foundling mutt called Lulu. My friend Gabi is a triathlete who trains in a park in Chicago, and about five years ago she noticed, day after day, a feral puppy in the park—limping, with its ribs showing, being shooed away from picknickers and scrounging for edible garbage.

Day after day she tried to entice the puppy to come to her, without success, until she enlisted the help of a man whose dog the puppy seemed attracted to. Gabi says she felt as sense of elation when she got the puppy into the back seat of her car...and then she thought, "now what?"

I won't tell the whole story of how she tried to track down the owner. Suffice to say we suspect him of being a breeder of fighting dogs. Lulu, who had a prodigious ability to jump, escaped from his yard by jumping over the fence. He didn't want her back; all he wanted was money. Once Gabi demanded that he reimburse her for the vet bills—the first thing she did was take the puppy to the vet—she never heard from him again.

Unfortunately, Gabi already had three pets—all cats, the youngest of which was 15 years old. One of them, Spider, was dying of cancer, and not in any mood to have a puppy in the house. (Amazingly, one of the three is still alive, just about to turn twenty.) Three months into the project Gabi made the decision to send out a mass email to her friends asking if anyone would like a good-natured but very intense young mixed-breed terrier.

Meanwhile, I had been telling my son for about three years at that point that yes, someday we would get a puppy.

Open Mike: Mike's Theory of Cars

Lake Drive in Whitefish Bay (click on image to enlarge)

My friend Gabi put it best: "You like go-carty cars," she once told me. (That's this post in a nutshell, so now you don't have to read any further unless you want to.)

My "philosophy" (I use the word in its vulgar sense) of cars was formed when I was very young, still a new driver. I got to drive a Maserati Bora and a Lotus Seven within a relatively short span of time.

Well, I didn't drive the Maserati; I drove in it—it was being driven by its owner, a friend's parent's friend. I was a passenger. The 1971–78 Bora, a supercar of the day, was a mid-engined coupe with a V8.

I grew up in Milwaukee. On the north side there's a road that runs by Lake Michigan called Lake Drive (not to be confused with Lake Shore Drive in Chicago). In the Village of Whitefish Bay, Lake Drive takes a nice series of tight curves one after the other. I can't speak for what it's like now, but when I was in high school, you could drive these curves as fast as you wanted to as long as it was three or four in the morning—nobody was out except for the occasional motorized law enforcement official. So I was very familiar with these curves.

Maserati Bora

In the Maserati, we navigated this series of curves at nearly twice the speed limit, which at that time was 35 mph. The number was impressive, but the Maserati was loafing at that speed—it went around the curves like it was on rails, with a minimum of drama. Apart from the feeling of centrifugal force, it didn't impart much excitement.

The 1957–70 Lotus Seven, by contrast, was essentially a big go-cart. Sitting with my butt planted on the seat I could lean out and put my palm flat on the ground (being careful of the hot exhaust pipe, which was right there). The Seven was the most exciting car at 35mph I ever drove—the rear-view mirror vibrated so badly you almost couldn't see anything in it, and the ground was so close it rushed past in a blur like you were doing 100. Ordinary corners were a thrill without even breaking the speed limit.

That was my epiphany. The Lotus Seven was a lot more exciting to drive than the mid-engined Maserati—at half the speed. It wasn't as fast, of course, but it felt faster. Speed, of course, is important if you're racing, or if you're being timed. But if you're not racing or being timed, speed is no longer an absolute—it's a sensation.

And of course the sensation is better in a car like the Bora if (another if) you can push it hard. I don't doubt that Jeremy Clarkson has fun with his Lambos—but then, he has a private airfield with a track set up by Lotus engineers and a dragstrip where it's both safe and legal to drive 200 mph.

I don't. Too bad.

All I get to drive on are public roads, and I'm constrained to something within shouting distance of the posted speed limits, or at least the "customary" speeds (there are roads in my town where I doubt the posted speed limits have budged since 1935, and 99% of drivers use "customary" speeds rather than the posted limits, the occasional dotard or thoroughly baked teen being the only exceptions. Even the cops use the customary speeds). To this day, I don't get all the fuss in the car rags about the endless parade of supercars. Who wants them? Not me. Maybe if you have autobahnen in your country.

My idea of the ideal car: a four-cylinder engine (but a good one), one-ton curb weight or as close as you can get to it, a five speed stick shift, and rear-wheel drive. Of course, within those limits, the sportier the better. Small cars are fun on real roads—and manage to provide their entertainment without requiring that you risk your license on a regular basis or endanger small living things, human or furred.

A glove box that accommodates the camera (and locks) is a nice feature too.

The chief downside of my kind of car? They have a tendency to be known as chick cars. ("Tart cars" in English.)

I'm happy for people who like Ferraris. I'm not even really interested—at least until such time as I move to Germany or am able to afford my own private airfield. My idea of a supercar extends to a Golf R or a Boxster S, and not much further. If someone gave me a Veyron or a Gallardo, I wouldn't know what to do with it—apart from sell it, and spend the money on nine to twenty-two of the kind of cars that I actually like.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Hope you have a fine Sunday—

Mike

Open Mike is a series of off-topic posts that appears usually, but not always, on Sundays.

UPDATE: Full circle: I did know, as several commenters have mentioned, that the old Lotus Seven is still being manufactured, in kit and turnkey form, in England, by an independent maker called Caterham. What I did not know is that that Caterham was recently purchased by none other than Team Lotus Enterprises...the announcement is dated just days ago, April 27th.

Closing the circle further, I also did not know that Team Lotus's colors seem to be remarkably suited to Wisconsin....

Hmm. I'm going to have to work harder!

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Featured Comment by Julian: "As anyone who has tried go-karting will tell you, your post is absolutely on the money.

"One other thing. Having driven extensively on German 'Autobahnen' I can tell you that, with a few limited exceptions (like the four-lane stretch between Darmstadt and Frankfurt-am-Main) they aren't what they're cracked up to be. Most have just two lanes in each direction and are very crowded—mostly with trucks.

"Even if you do find a relatively clear stretch and manage to wind the car up to crazy speeds, one (or both) of two things will inevitably occur. 1) A slower driver will pull out of the inside lane and you have to brake sharply to avoid a collision or 2) a Porsche, BMW or Mercedes (usually—possibly an Audi, too) will zoom up and attach itself, limpet-like, to your tailpipe—no matter how fast you are traveling. Being tailgated at legal speeds is bad enough but having another car barely a couple of feet behind you at 200kph+ is deeply unnerving.

"Trust me, Autobahnen are not as much fun as you might think."

Featured Comment by CK Dexter Haven: "My personal interest in cars of the supercar ilk is not in the speed they can possibly attain. It's more about the beauty of the design and engineering. A Ferrari is just a gorgeous thing. Aston Martin, same. I don't really care if they could only go as fast as a Lumina. It's sorta like when I had a Nikon F6. The only lens I had for it was a 50mm 1.8 Series E. Manual focus. I have no idea how fast the motor advance is, as I only shoot in 'single' mode. But, the camera was a joy to have, look at, hold, and use.

"The fastest i ever drove was during a vacation in Italy, when I rented a Fiat Punto. I think I averaged about 130 from Rome to Vicenza and the only car that passed me was a Ferrari F40. That was 15+ years ago. I don't need to do that again. Once was enough. Even though I could do that speed in the Punto, I'd rather have been doing 65 in the Ferrari. For that matter, I'd rather be parked in the Ferrari."

Featured Comment by John Brewton: "Well, Mike, I raced enduro karts for twelve years in the '60s and '70s. I have also owned numerous Ferraris and Maseratis. I published the Lamborghini-Maserati Newsletter from 1984–1990. I even raced a Ferrari Testa Rossa in vintage racing once (it was worth way too much to continue doing so with panache). Anyway I was once a gearhead, but I did all my own maintenance (!) and was an Alfa mechanic for a while.

"But today I drive a Prius. 'Nuf said."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Spot-on post. There was a great article in one of the mainstream auto mags a few years back articulating the same point. The author agreed that high-end supercars produced great numbers, while generating surprisingly little excitement. He waxed lyrical about the joys of driving something like the original tiny Honda Civic, ideally with bald tires. Sure, its 0 to 60 time and its braking distance were nothing special. But the manual transmission required expert clutchwork and impeccably timed shifts to get the most out of the tiny 4-banger. The mediocre brakes and limited grip made tight curves thrilling even at modest speeds. The overall harmony of its limitations was the key: it took real skill to drive it at 9/10ths—and you were still close to the speed limit, if not below it!

"The most fun I've ever had controlling a wheeled vehicle was riding a mid-range motorcycle 'real fast' on a twisting country road. Mind-blowing thrills, until you come to viscerally comprehend what can happen to you. I sold my motorcycle while attending medical school, after the first few experiences treating badly injured "donorcycle" victims in the ER. (Represses shudder)."

Featured [partial] Comment by Mike Plews: "I wish I had said the but have to be content to quote it: 'It's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.'" [See the rest of Mike's comment in the Comment section. —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Chuck Albertson: "The bus stop nearest to my darkroom is located outside the local Ferrari dealer. If people ask me what I was doing Saturday afternoon, I tell them I was looking at Ferraris."

Featured Comment by Jim McDermott: "On a topical note, wasn't Osama bin Laden reported to be living in a Maserati Bora for a few months early in 2002? Or did I misread?"

Featured Comment by Jim Hayes: "Nobody into Alfas? I owned about 30 of them from the early '60s to 2002, most pre-1967, never more than three at a time, raced four of them. Nothing beats a Giulietta Spider!

"Also had two Miatas and two new Minis—both more fun than the C4 Corvette or M3. Little, good-handling cars are more satisfying than Ferraris (My brother was a dealer for them in the '60s. How about 310 km/hr in a 275LM on the street?)—'More fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow!'"

Mike replies: I had the merest taste of an Alfa once—what was the one with the gearshift seemingly sticking out of the dash? I liked it very much, but I recall the owner (who was not mechanically inclined) had continual headaches with maintenance.

P.S. The Giulietta Spider is to the manner born....

So What's Driving Me Crazy Today? (OT)

I've just spent most of the morning dealing with my dental woes—second appointment this week. It was long, but lots better than my appointment two weeks ago, when I got strangely woozy and nearly passed out in the chair. I have no idea what was wrong with me on that visit, but something sure was.

Ya hate it when that happens.

So you know what's driving me crazy today? Fruit juice.

My son wanted some cherry juice, so I made a detour to the seldom-visited juice aisle at the supermarket on the way home from the dentist.

Fruit juice is basically just sugar water, no better for you than soda pop, so it drives me a little crazy when people constantly push it as a "health" drink. [Buzzer noise.] False. It's not.

Parents, especially, who are continually foisting juice on their kids as the moral equivalent of sugary soda are kidding themselves. Hydrate with water. Teach your kids to hydrate with water. If you use them at all, use sugary drinks strictly in moderation as occasional treats. Wasn't there a Flannery O'Connor character who would treat herself to a 7-oz. Coke every three weeks—in the summer?

But what's bugging me today isn't that. It's all those labels that say "100% Juice!" They're all over the place in the juice aisle.

Know what that means? Apple juice. Most fruit juices of any flavor you can buy at the local grocery story are mainly apple juice. Flavored, colored, with a little real juice of whatever the label says it is thrown in to keep the lie from being too blatant. Just because it says "100% juice" on the label doesn't mean it's 100% kiwifruit or grape or cranberry or pomegranate or cherry or whatever the label says you're buying. If you went down the juice aisle at the supermarket and removed all the juices that contain apple juice, there'd be precious little left. Look at the labels next time.

Dr. Charlie says the most perfectly unhealthy food is the iced doughnut. It's pure starch, fried in pure fat, slathered with pure sugar. If you must eat doughnuts, don't eat more in a week than you would eat in one trip to the doughnut store. (That's one trip when you go inside and sit down where other people can see you, not one trip when you buy a bag full and pig out in the car or back at home.)

Wish I didn't like 'em so much.

If you have a sweet tooth and a weight problem, I've got the perfect diet for you. It's essentially a lazy man's low-glycemic-index diet. All you do is cut three things out of your diet:

• Sugar,
• Grains and grasses, and
• Fatty dairy.

And don't go absolutely nuts with portions or fatty foods.

That's it. That'll do it. Want an even easier version of the same diet? Avoid white and yellow foods, or food with white or yellow foods as an ingredient. No corn, no white bread, no pasta, no breakfast cereal, no chips, no whole milk, etc.

There are a few exceptions to the white-and-yellow rule. Flaky white baked fish, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, skim milk, and Egg Beaters are all okay.

So you know what's really driving me crazy? The fact that I can't do it. I've tried and tried to follow the above diet, and it's really hard. I start and stop, start and stop. What's wrong with me? I feel like some sort of cretin who's congenitally deficient in willpower.

Granted, avoiding sugar is a tough one. The American food supply is nearly hopelessly polluted—adulterated would be a better word—with sugar. Sugar is the perfect industrial food: it's easy and cheap to produce, it's mildly addictive, it doesn't spoil, it makes all sorts of things taste better, and it can be added to nearly everything.

And it has been. It's in ketchup, canned soups, packaged bread, frozen dinners, even barbeque sauce. Next time you go to the supermarket, try to find things to buy that don't have sugar in them. Apart from a few staple ingredient foods like cuts of meat and leafy vegetables, and a very few things that are laden with fat and salt, you won't find a whole lot. Just try.

Or, on second though, maybe you shouldn't.

It will just drive you crazy.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Sal Santamaura: "It appears you've got oodles of willpower Mike. What you lack is won't power."

Mike replies: Oww....

Featured Comment by Patrick Perez: "I've been having good luck in trying to follow the principles in the Primal Blueprint, which is substantially similar to the principle Gary Taubes espouses (which I'll wager is the source of your diet plan strategy). I've lost ~20 pounds in the months I've been doing it. Certainly I'm not following to the letter (far from it) but I'm much more cognizant of how different foods are made up, and how that affects my health. The easiest way to keep the bad stuff out of the diet is a two-parter: Prepare your food from scratch, and use actual food as the ingredients. The more you can eliminate all prepared food, the better your success.

"It seems odd that we have gotten to the point that the concept of food containing food is novel, but that's the result of our first world lifestyle."

Featured Comment by Adrian: "A few months back I visited the dentist to have a rear molar removed. So badly decayed (sugar and all that), it crumbled in the dentist's tongs. After an hour or so battling to get all of it out, the dentist took a break. I passed out. Cold. Woke up to him shouting my name repeatedly. He and the nurse seemed quite freaked out. Know what they gave me to feel better? Juice."

Featured Comment by Amin: "As an endocrinologist (hormone and metabolism doctor), I am sensitive to the massive amount of false information on the web and in the media about what kind of diet is healthy or will lead to weight loss. Your simple diet prescription is right on target and similar to what I tell my patients every day. How refreshing to read that online. Re 'So you know what's really driving me crazy? The fact that I can't do it': You, me, and most everybody. I can say based on personal experience that losing weight and keeping it off is like quitting smoking except it doesn't get easier with time. In fact, it gets harder as the body undergoes metabolic adaptation to defend against weight loss. As many times as we fall back, it's important to keep trying. Without that, things get all the more out of hand."

Featured Comment by Simon Gledhill: "I visited L.A. from Australia a few years back, and got a rude shock on tasting the milk—it's sweetened...."

Featured Comment by Eve Schaub: "Our family—myself, my husband, and our ten- and six-year-old daughters—is four months into an experiment in which we are eating no added sugar in our diet for the entire year: no table sugar, no cane sugar, no honey, molasses, maple syrup, artificial or fruit juice sweeteners. I blog about our Year of No Sugar.

"BOY is it hard! And not just in the ways you expect—even when you get past the cravings—which do diminish—the social pressure and the supermarket's insidious ingredients are everywhere...bread, mayo, chicken broth, bacon, smoked salmon, tortellini...our family has begun to joke that if it has ingredients, we can't eat it. I highly recommend Dr. Robert Lustig's YouTube video "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" and the very recent New York Times Magazine article "Is Sugar Toxic?" Also the book Sweet Poison by Australian author David Gillespie."

Addendum to Hoarding

Note that I'm not an expert on this subject—at best, I'm an "instant expert" from reading a few books and doing a little research. But since Sunday so many people have mentioned to me privately and publicly that they share some of the characteristics I wrote about yesterday, that I thought I'd clarify this question a bit more: what's hoarding and what's not?

You're not a hoarder just because you have a lot of stuff. My guy the expert from the A&E show, Brendan McDaniel, says "hoarding" is defined not as the amount of possessions you have, but whether it interferes with your life and, especially, whether it jeopardizes your safety.

People with lots of possessions are fine if they can keep them organized. I once visited the photographer Arnold Crane in his penthouse apartment by the lake in Chicago and he had thousands of items from many collections displayed—it was a like a miniature museum. But the items were displayed beautifully and the whole place was fastidiously orderly and perfectly clean as far as I could tell. We had no problem moving around the apartment or using the furniture. He's not a hoarder, at least not on the basis of what I saw of his place.

Organizer Brendan McDaniel on the A&E show "Hoarders."

The diagnostic criteria for hoarding are things like, are you able to use your rooms for the purposes they're intended for? Where that's concerned, the most extreme case I saw on the show featured a man with a wife and four young children whose large foursquare home had an infestation of bedbugs. He was told he needed to clean the clutter out the house in order to fumigate it, but, rather than do that, he set up a tent in his yard and moved his family into it. And he had a whole rationale worked out about how people pay good money to go camping but that his family "enjoyed" camping right there at home. And freezing temperatures were on the way! The show joined him at that crisis point. I think everyone (well, everyone except that guy) will agree that that's not normal behavior.

One young adult woman had to move out of her own bedroom and sleep in her mother's bed when her mother's things invaded her room and she (the daughter) could no longer use it. Other hoarders haven't seen the top of their dining room tables for years. One mother and her child lived in a 6x10' space in the middle of a 3-bedroom house, doing everything in that space, from eating to sleeping. Several hoarders on the show could no longer use their own bathrooms—one woman borrowed buckets of water from a neighbor's spigot to use to flush her toilet—another woman used adult diapers to defecate in, and then kept the filled diapers, because they were "part of her" and she didn't feel right parting with them. The cleaners removed 3,000 pounds of full diapers from her house.

When you think about it, whether you've got a problem with this or not, the more room you devote to stuff, the less room there is for you. Hoarders effectively reduce the size of their own living spaces. The book Stuff recounts some cases in which hoarders were asked to draw plans of their homes, and they drew maps of narrow pathways or left whole rooms out of the floorplan, simply because the room was so full of stuff it couldn't be entered. It becomes like not having that room at all.

Other people have interference in their lives such as: they or their children cannot invite guests into the home; their spouse separates from them or divorces them because of their living conditions; they get into fights or disputes with neighbors or authorities; they get evicted from housing and become homeless.

Less spectacular criteria include things like: can you find things when you need them? Are your belongings stored such that they are safe, or are you ruining them by keeping them where they are? I personally have had an issue with not having any clear flat surfaces to work on when I want to do a project. An old girlfriend of mine used to sort her laundry on her bed, and sometimes there wasn't room in the bed for her—she would have to push the mass of clothes back and sleep uncomfortably on a narrow strip at one edge.

I realized only a day or two ago that I had become launched on a career of hoarding cameras without really even realizing it. As I determined what had to go yesterday, I first decided to keep only three, then expanded that number to five, and have ended up keeping seven—which, of course, is more cameras than anyone sensibly needs. Besides those listed for sale yesterday, I have two antiques (both Zeisses—and neither of which I'm counting among the "seven" I'm keeping), three lesser models that I'm going to put on Ebay, and two or three junkers or "repairables." They weren't getting in my way, but I had clearly gone more than a few steps down a road I didn't even realize I was on. Now, according to the criteria, if those were kept in nice condition and displayed in a clean and orderly fashion, there would be no problem. But let's just say that the camera cabinet was not in good order. I've been working on that today.

Still, the major criteria for hoarding is this: are you jeopardizing your health or safety, or that of children or pets? It doesn't happen often, but it's not ususual for hoarders to die because they become trapped in their homes—the fate of the prototypical Collyer brothers*. They get buried under an avalanche of stuff, they fall and can't get up, a fire occurs in the home and they can't get out easily, or they have a medical emergency and the emergency crews can't get in to administer aid. Or, they get diseases because of bugs, vermin, or rotting food. Things like that. Ironically, some people who hoard animals (the classic "cat lady" for example) perceive themselves as helping the animals, but they're really hurting them because they can't care for them properly and the conditions become so poor that the animals are at risk.

So, bottom line, some people do just have a lot of stuff—but that doesn't automatically make them hoarders.

Mike the non-expert

P.S. I'm still swamped with work today, so "Book o' the Week" will appear tomorrow. I hope.

*The article mentions that the white Collyer brothers stayed in Harlem as the neighborhood turned African-American. Curiously, my mother once lived next to a man who was the exact opposite. She had a house in Georgetown, D.C., a fashionable and expensive neighborhood in the nation's capital. The neighborhood had formerly been slums, "gentrified" in a process begun by Jacqueline Kennedy in the very early 1960s. But my mother's neighbor, who was black and not well to do, had never left. And he, too, was a hoarder—his house, like the Collyers', was stuffed full of stuff. He was a companionable if grumpy old fellow who I chatted with on many occasions (although he had a memorable eccentricity: on some days he just would not speak to anyone at all, even his son). Apropos my comments yesterday, I can picture his face, his cataracts which were worse in one eye than the other, his house, and where he used to sit on his front steps in the shade of a streetside tree, but of course I can't recall his name. I presume the situation was a bonanza for his son, because once the old guy passed away the house would have been worth a large fraction of a million dollars—or maybe even more than a million.

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Featured Comment by Robert: "My wife and I have agreed regarding all the clutter in the house: the one who dies first, wins."

Mike replies: Macabre, but funny!

Featured Comment by Nolan: "A small correction Mike: No one gets bed bugs (two words) because they're slobs; you get bed bugs by carrying them into your house after which they'll find where you sleep at night and start eating. People who are unclean and/or cluttery often times don't notice they have an infestation for a variety of reasons; they think bed bugs aren't real, they don't change their sheets, the bed is surrounded by crap, etc, however such conditions don't give you bed bugs, they just flourish because it takes people forever to notice them between their belongings. The problem with saying a person had bed bugs because they're a slob is it creates and perpetuates a stigma that undermines the reality of the situation; they affect everyone everywhere, and going forward it's likely that you and everyone you know will have to deal with bed bug activity first hand, so now is the time to declutter and educate yourself about them. I am a pest management technician with five years of experience under my belt. I have extensive training in bed bugs, directly from Gail Getty and Jerome Goddard, two of the foremost experts in the world."

Mike replies: Thanks Nolan. I modified the wording of the post a bit to reflect this information.

Featured Comment by Christopher Lane: "Mike, Interesting that we should intersect yet again. While you were cleaning up, so was I. As a result, I have a great collection of pristine photo books for sale. All hardcovers have dust jacket protectors. Many are way under going price. Most were recomended on this very website, Sorry, no Outside/Inside (I wish). Here's the list."